Material Tracking

Material tracking is a basic requirement of production management. It enables control of material flow, detection of waste generation, production rescheduling, automatic inventory management, and a myriad of other applications.

Conveyor belts usually provide status information allowing other systems to determine if a conveyor is running or not, and its nominal speed. However, the system typically doesn’t know how much material is loaded on the belt. In such situations, optical item counters can be applied to get a count of items transported (or lost) by the conveyor.

The generated count can typically be utilized by material track and trace applications, usually part of an MES. Since an MES contains information about the production schedule, material allocation, and disposition, combining this with counts received from conveyor belts allows full material tracking and flow to be managed from a single place.